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Stanford Student Develops Eyeball-Controlled Mouse

By Paul McCloskey

03/13/07

A Stanford doctoral student is testing a system that enables computer users control a mouse pointer via eye-movement, MIT’s Technology Review reported. Although the capability has been available for people with disabilities for several years, the inventor, Manu Kumar, wants to make the eyeball mouse as simple as possible for everyday use.

Kumars’ set-up requires commercial eye-tracking hardware, a specialized computer screen with a high-definition camera, and an infrared light. Together, they let a user click links, highlight text, and scroll by looking at the screen and tapping a key on the keyboard.

The system uses software called EyePoint, which works with standard eye-tracking hardware. To click a Web link, a user looks at the link and simultaneously holds a hot key on the keyboard. That magnifies the area of the screen that's being focused on. At that point the user refocuses within the magnified region and releases the hot key, which clicks the targeted link